


echo

by ruruka



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types
Genre: M/M, naegami parenting fic also takes place post canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-23
Updated: 2019-06-23
Packaged: 2020-05-16 15:44:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19321192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ruruka/pseuds/ruruka
Summary: going to put a couple things out there on the table number one no this isn’t some doodoo head mpreg fic naegi is a trans man case closed number two these are based on the designs of togami and naegi’s children in the bad end picture so i didn’t really create them other than names. they are also mentioned in an old fic of mine called ultraviolet but i like this better.i’m just having fun here.





	echo

**Author's Note:**

> going to put a couple things out there on the table number one no this isn’t some doodoo head mpreg fic naegi is a trans man case closed number two these are based on the designs of togami and naegi’s children in the bad end picture so i didn’t really create them other than names. they are also mentioned in an old fic of mine called ultraviolet but i like this better.  
> i’m just having fun here.

Moonlight had hit upon their faces then, across the white of the notebook page upon the table, placed together aside themselves alone. Pros and cons. A line down the center.

“Well, for starters,” had mumbled idly first from Naegi, pen strokes vociferous, “the world is...kinda in a state of total devastation.”

But the other, his other, had argued, because nothing better could be asked of Togami Byakuya himself. “Put that underneath _pros_ as well.” Eyes caught the ivory window light. “Repopulation is more vital now than ever.”

By the time the hour had since rolled, two columns wove themselves down to the paper’s furling edge, ink stains on the fingers that clutched it into view. _Can afford it,_ ~~_have_~~ _Makoto has experience (little sister), “fulfilling part of life”._ Reason after reason, combatted, _we work too much, lack medical resources,_ ~~_we’re_~~ _Makoto is stupid, MAJOR commitment (more than cat)._

Naegi read the list over. Top to bottom. And again. Another.

And when they’d fallen into bed together, aside themselves alone, it’d come to follow paper dropping gainst kitchen table oak, stares catching upon the hooks of each other, and one single nodded, “Okay.”

The discussion didn’t end there, hardly ended the whole night through whilst hands clutched sheets and legs circled the raw flesh of hips. “You’re certain about this?” Naegi must’ve been asked after every last kiss. “You haven’t just agreed with me to agree? This is what _you_ want?”

Questions like that don’t poise themselves as questions so much as a proverbial grasp beneath his chin to look eye to eye and confess. Togami had had a lovely little way with his words like that since the first second they’d met. Lovely.

“Yes, Byakuya, I’m sure,” Naegi laughed to him, hardly able to accept the kiss fallen between them with so tight a smile holding him. In the dark, he looked to him, the love of his lives placed there atop him on their bed, and knew it to be true despite every quirk of nerves in the stomach. “Let’s have a baby.”

Naegi does not think of that night so much as he does of those to follow, the stop of the heart after reading what’s been known to be real yet not entirely _felt,_  and the weightless shuffle of himself toward their bedroom threshold to stand in blinking awe before he’d been able to come up with the words, and he’d seen his husband smile before, but never quite like that, not the flush exhilaration taking him as he’d come over to bury Naegi in arms around him and kisses along his face; he thinks, too, of the awkward way he’d walked into the Future Foundation office the next morning, obsessing over keeping his jacket loose enough to cover what was nowhere close to there yet, and the way Togami had commanded so nonchalantly the conversation between the two of them and three more, and it’d been Asahina on her feet so fast her chair laid to its back, hands on either grinning cheek in such a manner that Naegi’s no doubt it’d been her buzzing mouth that had led to the next two days of questioning from throughout the entire office. Those who’d never made the connection or assumption of a 5’3 man built of round hips and face (of which he’s thankful, though the first reaction of Hagakure had been accusing aliens of implanting female organs inside him whilst he slept, so perhaps his background being more common knowledge could benefit certain situations). Of the three, Kirigiri had bore the least response, sitting cross legged and arm cross-ed in her seat long after the others had vacated Togami’s personal office on the premise of _be annoying somewhere else._  Naegi thinks of the way the near closest person to him in the whole wide world had blinked her soft lashes, slow breaths keeping even both shoulders, and the way she had not smiled but instead left them with her monotonous blessing. “Congratulations. I’m excited to meet my nephew.”

Even with the hand fanned before his blushing mouth, the smile that had insisted they’d no idea whether it yet be nephew or niece, Kirigiri looked to him just before her dip of an exit from the room, and said, soft, “Well. I love him either way.”

Naegi remembers the guilt he’d felt, after the discussion had ended and he’d taken to work at his own desk out within the hall, that the news had been spilled first to their friends without a thought toward the sole biological aunt that will come of it all. Guilt, though Komaru had been over the moon with merely the invitation to dinner that night, making hearing of her brother’s newest prospect enough to choke her on plain air. “A baby? For real?!” Nearly had her face split with that grin. Naegi remembers.

Naegi remembers the first time his slacks would not button. He remembers hands obsessing themselves with his body every new month, thinks of the _awkward_ way the makeshift world-is-in-repair-please-hold clinic visits had left him feeling, and of the nights awake wondering himself sickened over whether it’s been just to bring new life into the pitch blackened night the world has become. But it’s his job to fix it. And they’re getting there.

More than once or twice or ten times he can recall a sleepless dawn lying there on his own though knowing it, in some sort of strange little sense, not on his own at all, reminded so by every tiny hush of movement beneath his hands.

Naegi remembers, on the flip side of amazement, how thickly he’d groaned to not be allowed a drink on his twenty fifth birthday, then thinks more than anything else of only five days later where he’d been set free of it all and the house smelled of chiffon when they’d crept back in clutching a hold on the silence of a bassinet.

That smile he’d seen had not yet returned in such uncontrolled vim, rather looking only upon awe, _breathless_ wonder on Togami’s face as he held his son in his arms for the first time.

“This is like… _literally_ the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen,” owned a similar opinion, a lionizing look through Asahina’s eyes as they refused to leave the sight before them, the warmth lain to her arms. “Hi, Tomomi… Oh, you’re so cute! You look just like your daddy.” And, then, she _had_ looked away if only to send a glance Togami’s way two seats from her. “Not that I think _you’re_ this cute. But he does have your eyes.”

Six weeks of sleeping four hours a night left Togami without the capability to quip back in his mouth’s usual smartness, rather rubbing a hand beneath his glasses that dropped in just enough time to grasp Hagakure’s wandering wrist.

“Don’t touch my son,” he said, to which the other could only pout back some halfway laughing melancholy, a pleading enough look to draw that warmth from Asahina’s arms back to Naegi’s, laying him in caution down for Hagakure to accept. Supervision gleamed behind lenses. Naegi smiled a wary, tired length, and sat beside them.

“Ah, man, this is pretty dope,” came the official report, brushing one knuckle against a cheek it dwarfed. “Hey, Baby-chi. Uncle Yasuhiro’s gonna teach you everything you need to know about the world.”

“He doesn’t need to know how to go a week without showering,” Asahina rumbled, to which Togami’s exhausted voice added, “Or survive through life with a single digit IQ.”

A crying baby was enough to relinquish the thrill of temporary ownership, quick to hand him back to a father and take no blame. Asahina watched how Naegi held him over one shoulder, how gentle hands could ever move, and stood to proclaim ahead of it, “We should get going. You guys must be _exhausted.”_

Understatement of the century, but Naegi enjoyed their company filling the front living room as it had in the past, same as always but just slightly _new._ As much as he appreciated their presence, their insistence that scrolling through cell phone pictures was not enough to satiate, he appreciated just the same the courtesy to know when to leave. Both guests rounded themselves up by the doorway, Asahina leaning over a shoulder to question back, “Coming, Kyouko?”

From the side armchair, patterned in the same white velvet as the couch, she had hardly shifted, just enough to reach from one pocket to proffer forward a set of keys. “Start the car.”

Alone, the three- _four_ , of them, the four of them, moved only around so much to form a row of bodies across the couch, Naegi in the middle of them cradling his quieted child, watching closely Kirigiri’s lean to cast her shadow over him. He thought something of Christmastime when he’d been younger, walking by the snowy sidewalks of churches with their nativities out front. Kirigiri, the saint, the mother, with all the love in the world stored up in her eyes, reached forward with one gloveless hand and held the baby’s face within it, thumb brushing delicately the plush of a cheek.

By the time Tomomi reached six months old, their cat had just about gotten used to the dirty little mess of screams in the house, choosing to sleep on the low wood shelf beside his crib slats during the night. By the time another six had gone by, he reverted to slipping up upon furniture where tiny hands could not reach even with the added height of standing up on two feet.

“Mow,” Tomomi would always chatter, leaning his stomach to the couch’s cushions whilst curious hands grappled for the high back. Bottlecap eyed him, watchful and disgruntled all the same, though never would harm find the softest touches of flesh. “Mow mow mow mow mow.”

“Are you bothering the kitty again?” The most mild bit of a smirk sat to Naegi’s mouth as he stepped round corner to the living room, anxious heart never permitting him more than a minute out of sight. On the cue of his voice, he’d been toddled over toward, arms demanding in immediacy to be lifted onto a hip. Yellow eyes lost their scrutiny, squinting into rest upon the high couch back.

Naegi feels, if he should think back upon it, that time hasn’t existed since the first pen stroke against the pro and con list. First holiday as more than a couple, first Christmas and New Years that’d felt just a hint more sublime, turning another year older then in the same week finding himself the idiot tearing up over a first birthday; it’d all passed him by as if a gust, though in the moments of sitting in a darkened nursery with a teething baby outletting every last feeling in form of shrieks against his shoulder- that had felt an eternity each moment, all the sleepless nights and split second catches before falls could be had or tails be yanked. Yet he remembers fondly the way, once the screaming and drooling and _exploring_ had stopped with the sunset, and he’d slip so quietly from the room one would think him a breeze, the moments spent flat to his own bed with his lover dressing down from dayclothes beside him felt pure bliss, every pause between buttons to connect their mouths, rubs to his shoulders that told him he’s doing just fine.

Togami was there in those moments and in all the rest, never once breaking the rhythm of shared responsibilities. He let himself be woken at any hour by hands of half sleep demanding it was his turn (but they’d been lucky enough to find as their boy matured, as his hair shifted from its soft blond to a more dulled flaxen, that Tomomi was most certainly a nightmare to get to sleep, though he did tend to stay that way once a close hour of rocking and hushing had lulled him). Too, in the daytime that most often followed night, Togami did not accept any less than the best from himself in his roles, keeping the house kempt and monitored, and when Naegi came home there’d be dinner for him in the refrigerator and, on occasion, a husband passed out on the sofa with a baby wrapped up on his chest sleeping just as sound, the round warmth of a brown tabby cat curled beside them both.

In those times, Naegi could not imagine a more incredible sight. That had been, though, before another half year had passed to find it summertime again, a point in mid July where he woke and could not recall whether it was his day to go in to the office or Togami’s, but had been overcome with so much nausea he didn’t think he’d go either way.

It hadn’t been word of mouth, but rather her perception, almost immediately after stepping inside her apartment the same afternoon (alone, because as fate would have it, it was a Sunday and therefore neither of their days to work, so he’d said he was going to pick up milk and eggs if only to have a place to breathe his tightened lungs into relax). Kirigiri ran on Kirigiri Time, and she’d been home for that period of early afternoon hours to take her lunch break in quiet. A kettle glistered on one stovetop burner, he saw once let inside, fixated upon some place in the distance whilst his mind wandered all its own. He sat in her living room not more than ten minutes before she looked at him, just a notch of her eyes his way, and said to him, “You’re pregnant.”

If he could hear anything at all, it would have been the pop of his jaw as it fell open between them, blinking a dozen times over before gathering himself enough to sputter, “I- I-I… How...how did you know..?!”

Bringing a cup’s rim to her lips, eyes shut soft, she told back, “You said no to tea and cookies. And our periods stopped syncing up.”

Naegi, a palm instinctively brought to rest on his flat abdomen, blinked another motion if only to swallow back the sudden wet of his lashes.

“I don’t know what I’m gonna tell Byakuya.” Both hands moved to clutch the fabric of jeans. “This totally wasn’t planned. I- We aren’t ready for this now.”

“You’ve raised one child for almost two years,” she said, faintly, as if speaking to no one at all. “A second one won’t change things much.”

“It’ll change _everything,_ ” argued his head tucked into both hands. Kirigiri kept her eyes on him a while, shifting away only to sip from her teacup.

Returning home felt of rose thorns down both palms. As sick as he worked himself up to be over the whole idea, the silent drive time across the city had left him with somewhat of a lingering static on the lips, ones that every so often had curved at the thought of it all, twice as careful as he’d normally be to act a diligent driver.

But then he’d come inside. A quiet house, a vacuumed living room and wiped clean kitchen, all the tourist spots on his way to the open door of the bedroom. Across from him, he could easily find the silhouette of Togami’s back facing toward him, placed upright on the edge of the bed, gaze to the window. Then, he turned to him.

“You’re home.” No certain excitement, nothing above a flat acknowledgement of the fact. Naegi nodded, swallowing what had accumulated in his throat to block his words, but rather than speak he listened, stepping forth to sit on the bed’s opposite side. “I just finished getting Tomomi to nap. That’s forty five minutes I’ll never have returned to me, but,” and a pause for a sigh fit within it, “it’s alright.”

“Uh huh.” Fingers confronted each other in his lap. “I love you.”

“I’m more than relieved to be moving past this _baby_ phase,” continued on from him. “Children are much better once they develop logic and reasoning skills. There’s no reasoning with an infant about why he shouldn’t put his fingers in an electrical outlet.”

“Uh huh.”

“I’ve yet to figure out why that is, though it doesn’t matter now. I can’t say I’ll miss spending half the night awake and half the day keeping a two foot tall human being from ruining my upholstery. I just-”

“I’m pregnant.”

Silence.

In the space between them, shoulders facing shoulders across the made bed, Naegi felt no movement for a quiet while outside the hammering of his heart in both ears. And to chase it, as if shifting himself through solidified air, a reel of film ticking behind either eye, Togami turned to him, just enough to cast their glances together at the center, and stared.

“I…” Naegi clenched to fill the space with. “I, um, I just found out. This morning. I know it’s...it’s _really_ sudden, and we weren’t planning for this- I guess I must have missed a pill, or-or something. But…oh my God. I’m sorry.”

Emotion rolled back down his throat. He watched him a moment, how Togami sat there just _looking_ at him, or perhaps through him, focus settled nowhere and everywhere the same. In one motion, then, he stood, stepping himself around the bed to kneel himself down before his husband and grasped his knuckles into a kiss.

“You have nothing you need to apologize for,” the soft ridge of his voice asserted. “Nothing. Don’t be sorry for giving me the greatest gift of my life.”

When he thinks upon that day, Naegi will most often laugh at how stupid he’d been to envision a reaction any different. Nothing but love lives on Togami’s lips, not as they kiss him, not as they hum against sleeping hair, not as they remind him of all the calmest colors when he wakes to sharp breath-thieving pain in his lower back in the midst of a late April night.

“Aw, I get to have the cutest birthday twin in the whole world!” Asahina cooed in her first peer beneath the hood of the bassinet. She fawned over the baby and those fresh first weeks of life behind, turning next to place hands to her knees and lean forward in addressing the next sweetest. “How do you like having a baby brother, Tomo?”

Between bites on a finger, Naegi could see that smile on his first son’s face, untouchable joy as he said back to her, “Baby.”

He only wishes, looking back now, that such a _pure_ grasp of love between them could’ve lasted longer. He wonders if his parents had thought the same the first time he’d pulled his sister’s hair, or she’d called him a stupid dummyhead for saying milk chocolate is better than dark.

The first time they’d fought, not he and his sibling but the two he’s given life to, they’d been five and three, crouched on the carpet of the living room. A Sunday morning. Naegi only caught it from his position in the kitchen sifting through junk mail and chewing through a muffin’s chocolate chips, because he’d heard that chiding voice from behind a coffee mug seated on the sofa. “Leave your brother alone, Yukichi.”

On the floor just afront Togami’s feet, Naegi looked to the set of plastic blocks shared between them. A portion of them were categorized by color, reds and blues and greens stacked neatly on their own, the conviction of a true architect on Tomomi’s face as he went about it. “Don’t,” his little voice had mumbled at the first hand approaching them. Yukichi peered at him for a moment, as if testing the limits he could push his elder brother to, whipped out that hand quick as sin to knock the red blocks astray from their pristine arrangement.

“ _Stooop!”_ had been the first time Naegi had heard his son _growl_ like that, gone feral over the idea that anyone else should dare betray his hard work. Based on that, and the laughing look on Yukichi’s face at his own acts of destruction, Naegi could not pinpoint who took after Togami more. That behavioral role model cut through the brewing mess in quick time, leaning forward to click his mug to the coffee table and command attention in one low order. “Yukichi. Come here.”

“He’s not _playing_ good, Daddy,” insisted right away, wobbling over to place both hands in Togami’s waiting palms, looking to his eyes with a pouting huff.

Togami, for all that Naegi had witnessed him melt for those expressions, remained firm in his intoning, cooly, “You don’t get to decide that. And you’ll listen to me when I tell you to do something, regardless of the situation. Do you understand me?”

In thought, perhaps, he looked down to their matched hands, patting his own a moment before turning the world’s brightest green eyes back up at his father. “I wanna go t’bed.”

Maybe, Naegi decided in a snort of laughter behind a cheek half stuffed, his boys take after him just as much.

And though such a daunting milestone as the first ounce of casual sibling rivalry had come, he takes the demanding way he’d watched Togami speak to their youngest child as nothing but an hourly occurrence, being so that that youngest child of theirs had been born with twice the energy and ten times the curiosity as his brother. Where Tomomi fought bedtime, Yukichi would climb right up into bed on the first telling of him to, fall asleep after five minutes reading or humming or just plain laying, and each subsequent hour would slip in between his parents in bed until they’d both be too worn to argue over whose turn it was to bring him back to his own- and it wasn’t so much an issue on the mornings they’d wake up _dry,_ to their communal relief, for it hadn’t taken so long to find he shared a certain childhood _habit_ with his more timid father. Where Tomomi had been, to their fortune, relatively easy for a baby despite all the effort, Yukichi had been colicky, had been finicky about having his hair combed or pants zipped, had taken to Olympic running just as soon as he’d figured out how to work his legs.

Kirigiri’s theory was the sheer amount of ice cream she’d watched Naegi intake all nine months, while Togami had chosen to professionally diagnose their son with _the same amount of ADHD as in Makoto’s stupid, stupid body._

Still, they loved him. By all the Gods in the world did they worship every moment spent in the presence of their children.

Those moments were never all so bad as he points out on occasion. They watched their boys fight and they grabbed their boys up just before either of them could get a hold on the closet doorknob where Christmas presents get stashed, but as the sky fades orange to dark, Naegi will smile himself stupid to walk toward the living room just to have his shins bumped into at flying force.

“What are you doing, baby?” his smirk had asked, hands freshly dried from dish washing to now find the damp caress of hair below him. “Isn’t Daddy giving you a bath?”

“I was certainly trying,” answered for him, Togami’s steps finding the space around them with Tomomi on a hip, blond falling fluffy and fresh around his face. Naegi glanced to his stark opposite, the mess of brunet cowlicks on Yukichi’s head as he stared up to him, towel resting to bare shoulders and hands moving to insist himself be lifted. Rather, he’d been crouched toward, soft hands taking the towel to make an even further catastrophe of his hair in drying it out. Every last giggle sent his heart shuddering.

Naegi recalls every moment, though fills himself with only the good, the ninety nine percent of the time that could not be bartered out of him for any price. Togami, though, he thinks of the good and of the bad, yes, but seems to forget anything exists other than his yearning instinct toward fatherhood in the times they’re alone in their bed, lights out and blankets soft around them, mouths against each other like depraved teenagers who know nothing but tongue kissing one another breathless. Hands roamed Naegi’s skin, his shoulders and neck up to cup his face, allowing himself be pushed to his back with the other atop him. Togami worked his handsome self there, lips going first to nip bruise marks at the front of his throat. Naegi moaned bliss against the night.

Until it all stopped, a crashing sort of feeling that left him in blinks there, pulling against the arms in his hold to stare through the dark once Togami murmured sultry against his neck, “I want another baby.”

Perhaps Naegi’s expression represented all reaction conjured. “Uhm,” he’d mouthed despite it, dusky light winking off the other’s eye. “Are you… You’re not serious, right..?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” told him otherwise, and there he’d shifted to be sitting beside one another, atmosphere a thick bronze to surround them.

“Byakuya, that’s...that’s a _huge_ commitment.” His mouth strained against itself. “And do you know what it feels like to give birth? Imagine, like, getting your penis cut off with scissors, and then-”

“I was there, I can understand well enough by how loudly you screamed the entire time.” Naegi swore he caught an eye roll in that dark. Still, Togami persisted idly onward, “It’s only an idea, I didn’t say I was going to pin you down and impregnate you, did I?” A scoff tumbled through him, turning in a flare of the blankets to lay on his side. “...I’m only thinking of the future. Once my conglomerate is able to function at full capacity again, it’ll be beneficial to have as many contenders for heir as possible.”

“Wait, what?” Blinks hit upon his astonishment again. “You- H-How many _contenders_ were you thinking of?”

Togami seemed to think a minute then, face a soft pale of contemplation before turning his usual blunt way of being toward Naegi to say, “Well, I can’t rationally expect you to bear the hundred children that normally go into the running,” and follow just after Naegi had almost fooled himself into relax, “Ten to thirteen should be plenty. I wouldn’t expect many children made of my genetics should turn out as failures.”

Could he bring his jaw closed, he thought he’d benefit enormously, though was able to grasp himself into some air of calmness enough to turn over in his spot, facing strictly for the wall.

“Goodnight.”

Naegi felt not another breath until he woke with arms wrapping him from behind, and in front of him, the sleeping ragdoll of a three year old, and the wet circle beneath him on their sheets had been enough to keep Togami from mentioning his previous night’s desires again.

He did mention, though, in the finest light of next week’s living room, the latest memo sent out across a workplace email chain. “They’re beginning to put together real schools again. Yukizome claims there’s one in the works in Minato.”

From the lean upon his chest, Naegi stayed silent so long as he could before his head turned a slow motion up to face him, chap across the bottom lip teasing in gnaws. He didn't like to think he’d be so gullible as to send his own children somewhere that _heinous_...yet does recall he’d been safe enough in his youngest years, and PTSD perhaps isn’t the most honest of demons.

“It’ll be fine,” drew him out of that stupor. He looked to Togami more earnestly this time around, meeting their eyes together and noting the sense of gruesome nostalgia lapping at the tides of bellflower blue irises. “They’ll be alright. You know it would only take me about ten seconds to become a fully equipped murderer if anyone hurt my children.”

Naegi laughed, just a bit, because he knew with some sort of sickly pride that the statement held no hyperboles.

When the boys, their sweet sweet little boys, reached seven and nine, change had hovered the nation to halfway decency; Naegi at such a point could hardly recall the last mission Division Fourteen had ventured out on in search of tattered refugees or salvageable resources. He’d been driving one afternoon, on the trip to pick up from school or something of the like, and he’d nearly stopped in the road’s midst to catch sight of the nail salon being built up the street, and from that moment onward he was more certain than ever before that, yes, the world is going to be just fine.

“And I wrote my name fifteen times today and it all looked _sooo_ good, an’ I made a awesome house for Daichi’s and me’s- mine’s Bionicles when Sensei let us go for recess time, and we-”

“Remember to come up for air, Yukichi,” strung the low murmured comment from Togami beside him at dinner that same night, hands steady upon utensils and eyes gentle in their mock. Another seat off, Naegi perked a smile to such enthusiasm, the very same that continued on after the boy had huffed a large inhale just as told. “And then we got to go outside today and-”

“Dad said shut up, Yukichi,” cut him off the second time, tracks all halted in to puff an indignant, “No, he didn’t! Dad didn’t even say anything, stupid!”

“Not _that_ Dad, _stupid.”_

“Well then you meant Daddy, stupid, and Daddy wouldn’t not tell me to shut up because he loves me, _stupiiiiid!”_

“You’re both equally stupid,” Togami chose to console, lifting a bite just beneath the mouth. “No yelling in the house.”

For all his vigor, Yukichi pinched himself capable enough to, compliantly, whisper out, “ _Stupiiiid-”_

“Nobody’s _stupid_ ,” came Naegi’s final exhale, poking a finger up toward his oldest. “And there’s no reason to tell someone to shut up when they’re not doing anything wrong.”

“Well, he was annoying me, and that’s something wrong-”

“Don’t talk back to your father,” replaced the exasperated lilt in Togami’s tone to something nearer the edge. His hands rested against the wood of the table, watching keenly the way Tomomi flooded with guilt behind the eyes yet still felt brave enough to attempt a short, “But I-”

“Tomomi,” he clipped onward. “Enough.”

Hardly a moment felt to fall after it, not until the target beneath those stern leering diamonds flinched into himself to hide what could be seen of trembling along his bottom lip; in a clink of the table he turned so fast as to tear himself away for the descending hall behind them.

“ _Tomomi-”_

“Let him go,” took with the fawning of Naegi’s eyes, mouth a taut line against Togami’s rush to discipline. Naegi, rather, murmured idly a spoon across his plate, sighing against a settle of himself. “He just needs a little bit to calm down, then I’ll talk to him.”

For all such struggles parenting brought with it, Naegi was just grateful he could apply the same skills he’d learned in husband-rearing.

And _struggles-_ they could not find themselves stopping there, and seemingly as their oldest had aged had he grown further into hot self reliance, a consistent battle of a child imploding in emotions he knew nothing about the sorting of. That was Naegi’s domain, the rubs of palm on backs quaking with breath whilst ensuring _feelings_ are meant to be _felt._ Yes, the very same skills. Tomomi had been nine the first time he’d snapped at his brother or thought to argue with his parents (most commonly Naegi, who’d let him get away with several grumbling quips if only to _let it out_ before at last standing his ground), the first time he’d slept with his door closed at night and Bottlecap sitting outside it, the first time Naegi had gone to hug him before school and had his heart shattered against itself to be pushed away.

“He used to love snuggles,” mumbled against the glow of the lamplight the same night, hours and hours after the memory and only minutes after kissing his youngest goodnight and listening through the bedroom door of his oldest, returning to his own room after only silence met. Bottlecap curled up between their legs on the bed, the second side housing Togami and his fatigue. “I don’t know what happened…”

“He’s growing up, that’s all,” Togami answered, perhaps unbothered and perhaps not, though very slightly could Naegi detect his stiffened expression when he persisted, “Don’t you miss being called Daddy?”

Lamplight and hazel eyes, life breathing demand against his skin. “...Children grow up. It’s a fact of life, Makoto, you can’t expect him to still be sitting in your lap when he’s thirty.”

Somewhere inside, he doesn’t so much expect it as he does yearn.

Naegi remembers moments as well as the feelings pricked from them. He’d been somber- no, he’d been...he’d been grieving there, at his office desk, routine caught back up to have them on their normal work schedules so long as one of them’s out by school dismissal, tight over the thought of what he’d done wrong the past eleven years in raising two children to be the way they are. The two of them, they’re angels in his eye, though by the fifth phone call home to come and _discuss_ Yukichi’s behavior with his elementary school teachers, Naegi had begun to wonder just exactly _why_ his son had felt the need to stick a pencil in the water bubbler tap, or what had urged him to tell a classmate she’s ugly (that’d been a car ride home he remembers still, the way Yukichi had _insisted_ from the backseat at eight and a half years old that _well, she_ is _ugly, and she said she likes me and I don’t like her so she should’ve have left me alone!-_ the way the car had almost swerved from how deeply Togami had snorted at that, the way he himself had rolled his eyes behind a palm to then hear a proudly murmured, “That’s my boy”). Naegi could not pinpoint just why such a sweet sweet boy would take to little bits of mischief here and there and here again, nor could the thought of Tomomi’s natural sense of exhausted anger be comprehended (though his brother’s hypothesis had been the glasses he started to need around the second grade had turned him grumpy). Every so often, he’ll be tending to something or other and from down the hall will catch the cacophonous melody of his two boys laughing together, and so quickly will his smile fade once shouting replaces it, a tumble of weight against hardwood the usual cue for him to intervene. But they didn’t fight all the time, nor show their dirtier colors at every moment. Tomomi was aloof and moody most often at the provocation of another person’s bothering, or to a homework problem he struggled to solve within the first minute of thinking, or, consistently, to being awoken in the mornings- whereas Yukichi would be up an hour before the alarm to rot his eyes out on video games, habit alone. And to speak of him, Yukichi bore his own certain _mannerisms_ as well, developing a bluntness not unlike his taller father (one Naegi was more than accustomed to, or else the random statements that his cooking doesn’t taste good or his jokes aren’t funny would’ve blindsided him). There’d been a time, too, where they’d sat to dinner at a restaurant against all of Togami’s best judgement, and every three or two minutes Yukichi would ask what time it was and when they’d be leaving, every off chance utilized in swearing he had to go to the bathroom again- and when from one of those trips he returned with a chocolate chip cookie in one hand, Naegi remembered why it’d been so long since they’d all been out to dinner.

“They’re so well behaved,” he remembers a sitter commenting once, one of the odd times Kirigiri or Komaru hadn’t been available and instead they’d inquired a friend of a friend of a friend sort of deal, a woman from another division Naegi had exchanged good mornings with in passing on occasion. When they’d come home, both boys were asleep, and she’d been so quick to compliment that wonderful behavior Togami had scoffed in her face and asked if she’d actually met them. But Naegi thinks of it, of the shy way they’d always creep about the house when foreign company would come over, the contrast of jumping on furniture and shouting through every room once Uncle Yasuhiro entered the door. It’s cute to him, thinking on that little bit of his own personality bestowed to them both, second only to the similarity of the worshipping eyes they cast upon their favorite aunts.

Yukichi in every moment possible clung himself to Kirigiri, from the moment he was four years old asking why her hands look the way they do, to calling her to make certain she’d be at his twelfth birthday party. Tomomi never had a bad thing to say of her either, did everything she asked of him and thought of her when they passed her favorite snacks at the grocery store. But he’d always been just enough different than his brother for it to go noticed; when they’d visit her place, it’d take all of ten seconds for Yukichi to have his jacket slung off to the arm of the couch, lounged back upon it whilst letting her cat sniff the Bottlecap on his fingers, and Tomomi would meander beside him until offered a seat by the hostess and her soft even voice. He’d always take it then, and he’d tend to stick to _I’m fine, thank you_ as she walked toward the kitchen, though hardly would it be audible underneath Yukichi’s hollered, “Do you have more of those fancy cookies?”

On the other end, Tomomi behaved entirely in his element on the times Komaru would hang around their house, always eager to sit beside her and listen as she read through his picture books (and Naegi recalls a time where he’d said no, she didn’t do the voices as good as Daddy, but she was still good at it), share his crayons when she suggested they color, not be questioned why he liked to eat his candies in rainbow order when she did the very same. And when he’d grown up more, just about her height at ten or eleven, she’d spend an hour battling Yukichi in whatever video game he’d had pulled up, then stand to brush off and say she wanted to go see what her second nephew was up to just because she did, _genuinely_. The birthday she’d gifted him a PVC figurine of a character from a manga they shared interest in had been of his favorites, as well.

They loved their aunts, cared for them equal despite leaning more toward one or another. Naegi noticed their subtle favorite picking whether they did or not, and at times would be led to wonder if the same applies to a favorite father- then he’d see both their boys’ eyes light up in tandem when he and Togami arrived home together, and decided it wouldn’t matter even if it were true.

Age thirteen was when Yukichi left all their ears ringing with the sudden absence of his usual incessant palavering.

Naegi remembers sitting on the edge of his bed, on early afternoons where anodynes weren’t enough to drag him up from it, rubbing circles in his son’s back as he laid facedown in his pillows, moaning as though he’d been shot through the bone. When Bottlecap toddled his old round self toward him, Naegi lifted him to lay on the end of the bed, purrs soothing for the coming minutes.

“I went through the exact same thing, but I didn’t have someone to coddle me through every second of it,” Togami said upon hearing a second day of school was being missed. “You can’t grow six inches in two months without experiencing some pain.”

“My poor baby,” Naegi cooed back to him, a thinly veiled jeer, petting a palm against Togami’s cheek. “Do you want me to rub your back, too?”

Naegi remembers the tiny sneer that met him, and he remembers the enormous one on Tomomi’s identical face to have to look _up_ at his little brother in the coming months.

“I dunno, I just think she’s cool,” fell in the midst of one of the first conversations he remembers having where he’d heard his little baby’s voice sit deeper in his throat, not quite yet fourteen nor knowing what it mattered. Across from him, across the meager array of breakfast before work and school, Yukichi glanced upward with half a mouthful of cereal. “What do you think, Daddy?”

“I think women are insufferable,” Togami answered back, bringing a mug of black coffee toward his lips.

At that point, Naegi could manage to piece together what they were discussing, stepping back through the kitchen after waking Tomomi for the second time. He moved himself toward the coffee maker, flipping a cup down for himself only to rest a hand on it, blinking, as he listened on.

“Well, I think she’s nice. And cool,” Yukichi went on of the classmate he’d met a week or so earlier. In another mouthful, he slurred on, “And she’s different than other girls in my school, she’s not, like, insufferer-able, ‘cause she has a penis and stuff, so it’s cool. And she likes Legend of Zelda.”

Togami let his mug draw down again, eyeing his son keenly over it while he stayed nonchalantly buried in his breakfast, the same happy go lucky little bastard he’d been since day one. Behind him, Naegi turned, catching Togami at the stares, his own of silent questioning, the other’s of, at last, a shaken shrug, reaching for his coffee again. Alright.

It couldn’t have been more than a month later, just around a week after Yukichi had invited his newly acquired girlfriend over to play on his newly acquired Nintendo console with him, that Togami and Naegi had been in their bedroom, sitting up and talking over some silly stupid instance from the office that day, and Naegi had been laughing when their door was knocked upon, curtly, blinking until Togami took the initiative to invite the guest inside.

Down the room’s length, the lamp carried its honey glow, squinting to frame the image of their oldest son standing at the foot of their bed, arms stiff to his sides, face sternly set behind his wire framed lenses.

“What’s up, baby?” Naegi recalls saying to him, urging along the speech that had yet to flow.

Tomomi stood, sixteen years old and handsome as his father, staring forward, silent. And then, as though lit by courage, said, “I’m gay. Goodnight,” and left with a click of the door behind him.

Off guard’s edge Naegi sat, in the quiet of the room, processing what little he had to work with. Stupefaction died away as soon as Togami shifted himself.

“We’ve been good parents, then,” he remarked, leaning over to kiss his husband on the lips before laying down beneath the covers.

Perhaps, out of everything, the most difficult moment had been his second child’s first day of high school.

Naegi remembers both then and now Tomomi’s approach to his freshman year at fifteen years old, the tightness at the pit of his gut until going on a welcome tour through the halls of the recently restored building of Kinmokusei High School, inspecting every inch of it with his very own eye before allowing his child attend the next semester. When his first two years there rolled by without hitch, Naegi and Togami both deemed it perfectly safe, making it no issue to send Yukichi there the next fall. No issue, not until Naegi had gone to drop them both off on the first day of class, uniforms identical aside from the color of necktie that marked them first and third years, and had to watch them both walk away, just like that, waved goodbye, just like that.

He remembers wiping his eyes as he clocked in his time card, and the leader of the fourteenth branch approaching him if only to rest her hand on the small of his back.

“You _never_ stop embarrassing me,” catches his ears, ones awaiting all day long the sound of that voice and the one opposing beside him. Yukichi drops his backpack on the ground as he steps through into the house, calling back something among a laugh while Naegi turns to watch his sons come home to him.

Behind them, Togami enters in herding his two noisy lambs, keys jingling into a pocket. He bends to lift the bag up off the floor, demanding it back into Yukichi’s arms before moving toward the kitchen.

“What’s the matter?” Naegi poises to him, watching Togami tilt an eye roll for his only answer.

“All I did was say hi to you!” trails against the boys’ appearance in the room. Naegi sees first the dark expression on Tomomi’s face, Yukichi following behind him with no longer so much laughter as he defends himself. Tomomi turns on a heel, pointing between them, “I told you not to call me onii _chan_ in front of people. It’s _embarrassing_. It’s bad enough you have to come to the same school as me now, you don’t have to make me look like an idiot on top of it- _ahg!”_

The scolding halts to a finger lifted into a flick against his cheek. Tomomi thins his eyes, and Yukichi’s terror already displays itself in his trembling smirk and legs that sprint off down the hall. Within seconds, he’s chased, and even sooner is Naegi sighing into his hands.

“It’s hard to believe we made those two,” Togami comments from beside him, though isn’t snide at all to mumble next, slowly, “...I’m certainly a lucky man.”

Idly, Naegi draws from himself, chewing a half smirk to lay an arm around his husband's waist, chest thumping against itself as flowers unfold in spring, thunder roars on summer nights, snow lays itself down to winter’s croon, autumn brings with it deep amber brush.

“I love you,” he murmurs, the only answer to it a crash from down the hall, tumbling shouts of gagging laughter, stamping feet.

Naegi breathes there, a faint moment, taking for the hallway as he remembers yesterday, today, tomorrow, and forever.

Yes, a lucky man indeed.


End file.
